Conrad Lant, the British heavy metal musician who fronted Venom and ensured the Newcastle band became a huge influence on the genre, has died aged 63.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor more than four decades, Conrad\u2019s voice, bass and vision were at the heart of Venom,\u201d reads a statement from the band. \u201cHe created something that changed heavy music for ever. Venom never followed the rules. They forged their own path. And Conrad was there at the centre of it all \u2013 uncompromising, fearless and unmistakable.\u201d No cause of death was given.<\/p>\n
Using the stage name Cronos, with an eerie pallor and dressed in showboating leather ensembles as he made theatrical declarations about witches, Satan and the underworld, Lant brought great showmanship to the group, for whom he also played bass.<\/p>\n
While they never reached the commercial heights of forebears such as Black Sabbath or the thrash bands that followed \u2013 they reached the UK Top 75 only once \u2013 Venom had a big impact, and their album Black Metal ended up giving a name to one of metal\u2019s most important subgenres.<\/p>\n
Lant was born in Chelsea, London but moved with his family to Newcastle aged seven. His brothers were also musicians, one a drummer who joined Prefab Sprout (\u201cthey were shite,\u201d Lant would later opine), and another who drummed for Venom in the band\u2019s 21st-century period.<\/p>\n
Venom began as Guillotine, which Lant joined aged 16, initially on guitar, then bass and graduating to vocalist after a previous frontman left. Renamed Venom, the lineup solidified around Lant, guitarist Jeff Dunn (AKA Mantas) and drummer Tony Bray (AKA Abaddon), and they released their debut album Welcome to Hell in 1981. It featured the controversy-baiting single In League with Satan, which featured reversed speech about the devil and helped bring satanic imagery into metal.<\/p>\n
Inspired by punk, Venom intensified the heaviness of early British heavy metal bands by playing at a furious pace. The Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne \u201cwas singing about the devil\u201d, Lant said. \u201cI wanted to be the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told the Guardian in 2019: \u201cI had that snot and piss and shit element, which I wanted to put back into metal. I saw more and more bands shoving socks down their pants and putting lipstick on, and I just was disgusted by that, to tell you the truth. Fucking hell, if heavy metal was anything it had to be raw and dangerous and in your face.\u201d<\/p>\n
Venom pictured in 1984. Photograph: Fin Costello\/Redferns<\/p>\n
That impulse came to bear on five more albums during the 1980s, including Black Metal, whose demonic cover art and raw, hellish sound \u201ccarved in stone some of the essential features\u201d of the black metal genre, according to scene historians Michael J Moynihan and Didrik S\u00f8derlind in their book Lords of Chaos. Lant, who co-produced the album, said the making of it was \u201cpure mayhem from start to finish\u201d, with instrumentation including steel plates being cut into with a chainsaw, and a makeshift coffin having earth dumped on to it.<\/p>\n
Venom went on hiatus in 1988 and Lant \u2013 after pondering a career change in forestry \u2013 went solo as Cronos, putting out two early 1990s albums. Venom then reformed for another seven LPs, the most recent being 2018\u2019s Storm the Gates. There was another, shorter hiatus in the early 2000s while Lant recovered from a climbing injury.<\/p>\n
He trained as a fitness instructor in the 1990s (\u201cI did loads of classes, I played rave,\u201d he later said) and also began parallel careers in computer engineering and graphic design, though Venom continued to tour, including at festivals in summer 2026.<\/p>\n
Venom\u2019s pace, ferocity and darkness all proved seductive to a new generation of metalheads in the 1980s, particularly thrash bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. \u201cIt was so, so evil. This was a new kind of insanity,\u201d Scott Ian of Anthrax said admiringly of Welcome to Hell.<\/p>\n
Lant collaborated with another admirer, Dave Grohl, for Grohl\u2019s metal supergroup Probot in 2004.<\/p>\n
Lant\u2019s son Nathan thanked Venom\u2019s fans after his father\u2019s death. \u201cI know he really appreciated you all. He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conrad Lant, the British heavy metal musician who fronted Venom and ensured the Newcastle band became a huge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-617768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}